By BILL HEANEY
Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC
The Catholic Church in Scotland has criticised the SNP Government’s Lord Advocate claiming that she undermined freedom of expression when she said that prayer vigils outside abortion clinics could be “far more damaging” than verbal abuse and insults.
That’s not just dotty … it’s plain daft.
Ms Bain has been reported as saying that protestors “standing in judgment” in silent vigils may be “just as concerning, just as worrying, just as psychologically damaging” as those who shout abuse at women who seek health services, but she has produced no evidence to support her words.
The language around this debate is reckless to say the least. There is no question of demonstrators “shouting abuse at women who seek health services”. Nor is there any such a thing as buffer zones.
What there is though are a group of devout Christians – not all of them Catholics – praying for the babies expected by women who have decided for whatever reason that they don’t want them in their lives.
The Lord Advocate is reported to have “addressed the UK Supreme Court about safe zones outside abortion clinics in Northern Ireland when she was questioned on the extent to exclude silent vigils and prayers from buffer zones”.
And the fact that “the Scottish Government is considering to put buffer zones around abortion clinics that would prohibit protests”.
The Abortion Services Safe Access Zones (Scotland) Bill, proposed by Gillian Mackay, pictured right, a Scottish Green MSP, would allow 150-metre zones that was free from protestors.
The bill has received 12,000 responses in the consultation phase, which are reported to be “being analysed before being put before parliament” and Glasgow City Council “is considering separate restrictions that would be enabled by using by-laws after pro-life protests in the city”.
That’s a confusing piece of reporting in that it doesn’t say whether the responses were for or against these prayerful assemblies or whether the restrictions by way of by-laws would be enforced before or after the event.
The whole thing is the usual gobbledeygook we have come to expect when the Scottish Parliament sets out making laws such as those in relation to the behaviour of fans assembling before football matches and legislation to deal with hate crimes and public order.
In an area where the precise use of words is so important, the government have a track record for falling down on the job.
Peter Kearney, a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland told the Times of London: “For Scotland’s most senior law officer to so readily demean the foundational pillars upon which our civil liberties depend is greatly concerning.”
Lucy Grieve, co-founder of Back Off Scotland, the campaign group pressing for “buffer zones”, told the UK’s foremost newspaper of record that the proposed legislation would restrict protest only in the immediate vicinity of places providing abortions, and “in no way [suggests] a ban on protest anywhere else”.
In other words the proposals are poorly drafted, unenforceable and not fit for purpose and should be consigned immediately to the Lord Advocate’s wastepaper bin.
*****
Everything comes to him who only stands and waits. I once had a friend who took so long to complete any task he ever undertook that his mother in law decided to name the house he was doing up for her daughter to move into with him EVENTUALLY.
I think we’ll have to come up with a similar moniker for West Dunbartonshire Council although it will have to be EVENTUALLY IF AT ALL.
I have been in this scribbling business for a long number of years now and a frequently recurring subject over about 50 of them has been the wrecks in the River Leven.
My eyes almost fell out when I read in the Lennox Herald – I don’t feel like going to their meetings these days after their petty minded ban on me speaking to them – that the Council had at last come up with a way to get rid of them.
Councillor David McBride, who has more titles to his name than the Maharajah of Timbuktu, tells us he is the chair of the Town Centre Forum and that he has been “pursuing the removal of some unsightly wrecks” for some time.
He added: “As you would expect funding was difficult to achieve in the current climate.”
Come off it, David. Funding for this hasn’t been there – or so we have been told – for the past half century.
No Dumbarton Harbour Master, a post which goes along with the £150,000 a year job of chief executive of the local council, has ever had the acumen to raise the money to get rid of the wrecks.
Surprise, surprise, however, it looks as if the Council will at last be able to come up with the cash from a source that’s been sitting under their noses since Adam was a boy.
Step forward the Common Good Fund which has been conveniently christened “The Dumbarton Town Centre Common Good Fund” and they’ve come up with a ruse to apply for funding from the Dumbarton East Community Council as “a host sponsor” for the wreck removal work.
Perhaps that £1 million they are about to pay out in compensation to the disabled employee they bullied in their old headquarters would have covered it.
At this point I began to wonder if – as was the case with the funding for the Levengrove Pavilion Cafe – they had got it all wrong and that some bright spark in the Chief Executive’s Office thought the wrecks were in Gruggies Burn, which is in the East End.
The words “ring-fenced” also appeared in the Lennox report about the wrecks. They have been used too often recently in relation to projects that might have been tackled using Boris Johnston’s levelling up cash, but that was being economical with the truth yet again.
Their “nae money” for anything like that excuse is a poor one. Who knows we might have been able to have a viewing point, a balcony or a veranda as they are known in Dumbarton, built on to the £8 million library we don’t need and few people want in Glencairn House.